Eustace Conway has had a book written about him, a prize-winning documentary filmed about him, owns two world records, and word is that Ron Howard is working on a movie about him.
Sounds like some kind of celebrity, but Conway doesn't look like any celebrity anyone ever saw. He wears tattered and stained work clothes, washes up in screaming cold water on a cold winter morning and says he can't remember how old he is. (He's 45.)
What's important, he said, is the way he and his crew work. For the past week, Conway has been logging a plot of land with a string of horses and mules near the intersection of Murphy School Road and Friends School Road in central Orange County, where Allan Rosen plans to develop 36 acres with 11 houses under the name Duke Forest Ecovillage.
"I told him we would work very hard, and I knew that not very many people know what that means," Conway said. "They don't see very much of that in this day and time."
Conway and his crew of eight men and women, three mules and four horses arrived at the Ecovillage site on March 9 and set up their tents, tarps and outdoor kitchen for their week-plus camp.
Conway is an outdoorsman, farmer, educator, camp counselor, lecturer and record-breaking horseman, who uses his horses, mules and crews to carefully log forests in ways that barely leave a mark on the earth.
Rosen wants his community to be built in harmony with nature, saving certain trees and plants and clearing out others. He had heard about draft horses being used in logging and clearing operations, so he decided to call Conway to ask him some questions about it. Conway, who runs a 1,000-acre farm and camp called Turtle Island Preserve near Boone, liked the sound of Rosen's plan and said he'd be willing to bring his crew and horses to do the work.
The crewmembers woke before dawn, ate breakfast around a campfire, put the harnesses on the horses and went to work. Rosen had marked trees he wanted saved and double-marked trees he didn't want injured.
Conway planned how to bring down each tree so it would do as little damage as possible to the trees nearby, and then began cutting them with a chain saw. Others on the crew came behind and cut off limbs and branches and cut the long trees into lengths.
Then a horse or mule was hooked up to the logs, and they were dragged into piles. Rosen plans to set up a portable mill on the property to make lumber for the houses from the logs.
Even on Friday, when it rained all day, the crew worked, and because they weren't using bulldozers or large machines, mud wasn't really a factor. On Sunday there was barely a sign on the ground that hundreds of trees had been cut, moved and stacked.
Conway uses a variety of horses and mules, and they aren't the huge beasts people might imagine. One is a cross between an Arabian and a Morgan, another is half Appaloosa and half Arabian, and he has a team of Belgian draft horses, too.
"A lot of these horses are small draft horses that people don't think of being draft animals," Conway said. "They can do amazing things that people don't realize they can do."
One of the horses Conway brought to the logging site is named Curly, and Curly has the curliest red hair all over his body and legs, including his mane, tail and forelock. Curly once pulled Conway in a four-wheeled buggy for 56 days in the Midwest on a trip of 2,486 miles through the U.S. and Canada to break the world record for fastest and longest four-wheel buggy trip, Conway said.
He also set the world record of 103 days for a trip across America on horseback.
"I've done a lot of amazing things, but those were two of the best," he said.
The crew and horses worked from sunup to sundown. "Everything is hard," said John Pasquina, who has been working with Conway for a couple of months. "The hardest part starts at the beginning of the day before the sun comes up," he said. "But it's also one of the most beautiful parts seeing the sunrises."
On Sunday, Conway and his crew packed up their camp, loaded the horses and mules into trailers and headed back to Turtle Island Preserve.
For Rosen, it was a good start to his project. His next step is to begin planning for water wells and septic tanks. If all goes as planned, the community eventually will include 11 homes, including his, a market garden and a nursery that will be someone's business, and two miles of trails through the woods.
People buying lots can build their own homes, but there will be some covenants written that will set energy performance standards and aesthetics, Rosen said.The Herald Sun
